Anarcho-consumerism

Opinions Astronomy Aviation Pictures Bits & Pieces Travel Pictures

Note: This piece was originally published as a comment to a post about law and order at Harry's Place, and is reproduced here unchanged. It can be read in its original context here. Basically it's about whether there has been a significant increase in social disorder since the 1950s, and if so why. Now for the Grand Unified Theory... In many ways society is enjoying constant progress. We are becoming steadily more affluent, and the average citizen can now live a longer and healthier life than has ever been possible before. Scientific progress brings an ever-deeper understanding of the nature of the physical world, and technological innovation creates exciting new opportunities (like the fact that people from around the world can so easily participate in this discussion). But that doesn't mean that everything is getting better, and social disorder has visibly risen since the 1960s. Look at the puking and brawling in the average British town centre after pub closing time. Look at the ubiquitous graffiti. Listen to all those warnings from the police and government about not showing your mobile phone in public in case someone steals it, which represents a contemptible surrender to the criminals. Would any of that really have been tolerated in the 1950s? If not, what's changed? Firstly, the collapse of the old social hierarchy has significantly reduced the stigma attached to behaviours that would once have been seen as lower class, such as public drunkenness, and drunkenness alone accounts for much else (such as Swindon Irish Club on a Saturday night). But drunkenness is popular because it's fun, so without strong social disapproval many people will do it to excess. Secondly, limitations on sexual activity have been drastically reduced due to a variety of factors, not least the invention of effective contraception which removed the overriding practical necessity for women to refrain from sex before marriage in order to avoid having a child without the means to support it. That is not in itself a bad thing - the sexual choices of consenting adults should be a strictly private matter - but it would look that way to a social conservative who sees such behaviour as inherently immoral. Thirdly, drug addiction was an insignificant problem in the 1950s but is a major one now. Addicts and dealers commit a huge amount of crime, heroin does to its users what Gin did to the underclass in Hogarth's time but much faster, and addiction turns previously responsible people into amoral monsters. For this we can blame the 1960s. The hippies created an enormous demand for drugs and thus encouraged criminals to move into this new and highly lucrative market. They created a new criminal industry, which needed to sell harder drugs and create more addicts to sustain itself. In the crack epidemic of the 1980s the working class paid the price for the hedonism of selfish middle-class dropouts in the 1960s. Fourthly and most importantly, the loss of cultural confidence that has been noted in other discussions on this blog leads to a lack of certainty about what constitutes acceptable behaviour. How can we condemn others when we're so uncertain of ourselves? The left would probably blame consumerism and the right the moral relativism of the sixties radicals, but the second is actually a product of the first. The sixties generation had grown up with the first flowering of the consumer society, and simply wanted to extend the complete freedom of choice that they had always taken for granted in other areas into those that were still governed by moral strictures. Consumerism encouraged them to believe that they had a right to get whatever they wanted right now, and teenagers inevitably just wanted to have fun, get drunk, and get laid. The result was a counter-culture ideology of free sex, free drugs and total personal freedom that was inimical to any idea of self-restraint, and which therefore felt threatened by any idea of moral judgement. This differed from a principled libertarian position in that libertarians recognise the personal responsibility that comes with personal freedom, whereas the sixties ideal of instant gratification without consequences was simply consumerism taken to its ultimate conclusion. It was anarcho-consumerism. But the counter-culture also developed a Year Zero mentality that encouraged the rejection of all existing social institutions in favour of whatever new way of living they chose to invent. Burke would have recognised it as the same attitude he saw in the French revolutionaries. So the counter-culture's lasting contribution to progressive politics was to inject it with an automatic hostility to everything that the previous generation had believed in, including all the positive achievements of Western civilisation. Simply by happening the radical social changes of the 1960s had fractured any consensus about what the values of Western society were. But the Year Zero mentality implanted a lasting uncertainty in mainstream society about whether their own culture was an achievement to be proud of or a vile stain on history. This self-doubt continues to undermine society to this day, and one of the most urgent challenges now facing moderate leftists such as the Hatchet gang is to articulate why progressives should be proud of the positive achievements of Western civilisation, and must fight to defend them. The most dangerous threat to a democratic society is not that its citizens may fear to defend it but that they may cease to believe that it is worth defending. This also helps explain why so much of the revolutionary left is now committed to negative causes (anti-war, anti-capitalism, etc.) rather than to promoting an alternative vision of society. If everything Western is uniquely evil, all you have to do to be on the right side is to oppose whatever the West does. There's no need to propose an alternative because by definition anything else is better. Fifthly, some of the radicals dropped back in and rose to positions of prominence. Many naturally went into the media or academia, where they could make a living through self-expression. Therefore the kind of leftism that predominates in the academic and media establishment is instinctively anti-Western in the broadest sense. Whether consciously or not, they want to convince us that our society is something to be ashamed of because they feel it in their bones that the West is bad. So in producing TV shows, books, etc. that express their values they promote the loss of cultural confidence, and works that depict violence and societal decay simply reflect their own sense of the rottenness of Western society. Thus, they both encourage the growth of disorder and exaggerate the extent to which it has actually taken place. Sixthly, even right wing and apolitical media outlets have a strong interest in publishing sensational crime stories to give the reader a frisson of fear and/or an invigorating sense of outrage. Sex and death sells. But in a media-saturated world, this creates an exaggerated fear of crime because it sends the constant message that nobody is safe anywhere. Of course, there has always been a gutter press, but in a self-confident society their lurid tales of mayhem would not have such an effect. Finally, the state discourages individuals from taking any role in the maintenance of law and order. The bigger government gets the less people feel that anything is their personal responsibility anyway. But citizens are actively discouraged from "taking the law into their own hands", so anyone who feels tempted to challenge anti-social behaviour knows that if the offender attacks them they are likely to get prosecuted for assault if they defend themselves with any vigour. Crime is portrayed as a matter for professionals in which the public has no right to interfere. Since the police cannot be everywhere at once this reduces the ability of society to maintain order.

		Last Updated: 1 Oct 07